Top 77 Quotes & Sayings by Donald Ray Pollock - Page 2

[Degree in English] gave me a little more self-confidence, to know that I'd managed to complete something like that.

I think some people at Doubleday worried about that a bit when Knockemstiff came out, but, with the exception of one or two people who complained that I didn't do justice to the many good people who lived in the holler, most of the local objections have been aimed at the violence and foul language.

I started going to Ohio University when I was in my mid-thirties, ended up with an English degree when I was forty.

I look upon [writing about religion] as a nice way to get by in this precarious world, though I've never been able to do it myself.

I don't really think the outburst is recent; there have always been writers in Appalachia.

One of the reasons I write about religion is due to my own envy of people who truly feel the presence of god in their lives, good souls who believe devoutly in a supreme being and an afterlife.

There are a lot of writers from the South who would probably have once figured they needed to go to New York to make it who have stayed closer to home - people like David Joy, Tom Franklin, Sheldon Lee Compton, Wiley Cash, Mark Powell, and Alex Taylor.

Probably because I personally knew at least six or seven people in Ross County who died from overdoses in the last three years. The heroin epidemic is just too aggravating and sad and unsettling for even someone like me to live with and think about for the time it would take to write a book dealing with it.

I don't think writing fiction has changed my worldview.

Part of the reason might be that I was born in 1954 and I look upon my youth with great fondness, like many old men. And, though my work doesn't focus much on good things, I see that period as America's heyday. True, we had many problems, like racism and Vietnam, but we still weren't quite as nuts as we seem to be now.

I really have no idea what the French think of my characters, or why The Devil All the Time did so well there.

The biggest influence on my writing, besides snagging some ideas about black humor, was that the paper mill had a program where they paid 75 percent of the tuition and book [costs] for employees who wanted to go to college part-time.

I do think they [French] view my writing itself as exotic - though that's probably not the best term for it - to a small extent, mainly because I say things that most French writers would probably hesitate to say for fear of offending someone or upsetting public sensibilities. I don't think that answers the question, but I'm not much good at figuring readers out or I would probably be writing bestsellers.

Nostalgia is partly illusion in that we remember things differently as we get older, etc. But that doesn't mean, when historians look back on the 1950s, say, from the year 2090, it won't be judged as a saner, slower, less narcissistic, more family-focused, and economically secure time.

I think my characters - well, at least a few of them - are hoping or searching for some kind of contact with god.

I'm not sure I would have ever decided to try to write when I was forty-five if I hadn't already gotten that degree [in English].

I'm not sure what the proper label might be, or the most accurate one, but someone once called my stuff Southern Ohio Gothic and I thought that was fair.